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Cardinals’ song means spring is around the corner

The handsome cardinal remains quiet during the winter, but begins to sign as spring approaches. "It's all about sex," says one ornithologist.

Cardinals, like other songsters, sing in the spring to advertise for a mate and to hold territory. (Margaret Bream / Toronto Star) | Order this photo

By Margaret BreamToronto Star

Sun., Feb. 24, 2013

After failing to see his shadow on Feb. 2, Pennsylvania’s Punxsutawney Phil, the granddaddy of groundhogs, predicted that spring was right around the corner.

Despite the gunmetal grey skies and ragged wind shaking the trees outside my window as I write, I now have independent corroboration from my own backyard that spring is imminent.

On Feb. 14, I was sitting at my kitchen table when I heard a sound as lovely as could be. I listened carefully. Sure enough, there it was again. A sharp, short ascending whistle. But clear and vibrant just the same.

It was a northern cardinal singing brightly.

The song I heard was somewhat tentative and brief, a two-tone whistle often written as “whoit, whoit,” that lacked the more complex patterns and added trills of songs typically heard from cardinals later in the spring and summer.

All the long winter, the pair of handsome cardinals (Cardinalis cardinalis) that frequent my backyard have not sung a note. Neither the male, impossible to miss in his brilliant red plumage, nor his less flashily attired mate.

Silently foraging on the ground and daintily picking her way through the bushes, the Mrs. has been easy to overlook with her muted olive-drab feathers touched by a watercolour wash of persimmon. Often, it is only her bright orange beak and rakishly angled crest that give her presence away.

Up until Feb. 13, my pretty pair were as quiet as church mice as they flitted about the garden. The next day, they began to sing.

What caused this abrupt change in behaviour?

“It’s all about sex,” says Dr. Kevin McGowan, an ornithologist at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology in Ithaca, N.Y. “Cardinals sing to hold a territory. They haven’t been serious about anything all winter, and now they are.”

As the days lengthen, McGowan explains, the cardinals’ eyes sense a change in light. This causes a cascade of hormone-related changes mediated through a part of the birds’ brains called the hypothalamus. When the levels of hormones, especially testosterone, get high enough, the cardinals’ gonads begin to grow to get ready for the breeding season. This, in turn, stimulates the birds to sing, both to find a mate and to maintain their territories.

At the end of the breeding season, the reverse happens. The cardinals’ gonads shrink (a weight-saving device, McGowan says), and singing tapers off.

While the physiological explanation may take some of the poetry from the gift that is birdsong, it cannot diminish our enjoyment of it.

Some years ago, I rescued a book published in 1952 called Our Amazing Birds: The Little-Known Facts About Their Private Lives. In this water-stained old treatise, author Robert S. Lemmon described the northern cardinal as “a sturdy black and vermilion beauty (that) is a bird in a thousand, a combination of character, colour and musical ability that merits top billing in any feathered company anywhere . . .

“Many a depressing winter day is brightened by their vigorous, up-and-coming presence and the gaity of their fantastic garb. Year in and year out, they are morale-builders of the first water,” Lemmon wrote.

And from their cheery winter whistles, peerless predictors of spring, he might have added.

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